Well, I’ve watched the two available episodes of the show, spent the past month speaking to individuals involved with the production, and even obtained a copy of the original script for the pilot, which airs tonight, and I now feel confident in responding to Suebsaeng and Maerz as follows: “Yes,” and “Very.”

It isn’t just the demeaning subplot that requires Brenda Song to dress up in a Japanese schoolgirl outfit to help her bosses Eli and Warner, played by Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi, score a capital infusion from Chinese investors. (Despite the writers’ apparent confusion between Chinese and Japanese pop cultural motifs, that gag is essentially more misogynistic than racist — and in an era where women in technology feel increasingly embattled, turning a smart, professional producer at Warren and Eli’s successful videogame company into a glorified booth girl is particularly ugly.) And it’s not the flippant use of the term “Orientals,” or even the extended scene in which basically the entire cast — including Song — mocks the minute size of “China penises,” over and over and over.

What makes “Dads” so deeply and fundamentally racist is that it is MacFarlane’s entitlement fantasy, in which the only castmembers of color are women who exist to serve and service the spoiled little boys’ club at the show’s core.

Song, who plays Eli and Warner’s aide de camp Veronica, Vanessa Lachey, who plays Warner’s wife Camilla (referred to as Latina, though Lachey is actually half-Filipina), and Tonita Castro, who plays Eli’s “hard-drinking, outspoken maid” Edna are there to be mocked, commanded, sexed or pimped on a whim, and they’re expected to grin and like it.

When forced to wear revealing clothing and ogled by both partners, Veronica rolls her eyes, and later asks for a raise and a promotion (a nonfictional woman would have sued for sexual harassment and ended up owning the company). Warner’s dad, played by Martin Mull, asks his daughter in law Camilla to pretend to be his secretary, and she agrees with a smile, to which he responds, “Gracias, muchacha.” Later, Eli’s dad, played by Peter Riegert, mistakes Camilla as Warner’s “beautiful maid”; again, everyone lets the comment slide.

And here’s the amazing thing — the show could’ve actually been worse. Much worse.

In the original script, Veronica actually has sex with one of the Chinese businessmen in order to guarantee the deal: “Let’s just say I wrecked him in the bedroom like a panda wrecks bamboo if a panda was having crazy sex with bamboo,” she says. “No big deal. It was China penis, so it was like wrecking a furious baby’s toe.” Everyone hugs and cheers Veronica — whom the partners refer to as the “resident ching-chong” — for prostituting herself on behalf of the company.

In the version airing tonight, Warner’s dad endangers their deal by making vaguely racist comments during the partners’ meeting. In the original script, Eli jeopardizes it by hitting on the sole female member of the Chinese group, “Dongmei,” who can’t speak English — but, he vows, won’t need to since she can “moan in Chinese.” Veronica asserts, quite solemnly, that “All Asians hate all other Asians. They all look down on each other for weird reasons….I’d never sit in a room with [someone from] Guangdong. They wear fish skin underwear and bathe in dog spit.” Later, the Chinese translator, who’s Guangdongese, suggests that he and Veronica take a postcoital bath of “refreshing dog spit.”

And Warner, arriving home, asks his child, “Hi, small baby. Did your Latina mommy beat you today with her mean, jungle hands?”

This, it should be noted, is the script that got Fox to buy six episodes of the show even before it was cast. Which may be why Fox entertainment chairman Kevin Reilly and chief operating officer Joe Earley have been driven to defend their decision to greenlight the series with a formal statement, saying that “this is a show that will … poke fun at stereotypes and bigotries — sometimes through over-the-top, ridiculous situations.”

Fox has declined to offer further comment.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear how the show is lampooning bigots, given that there’s no one that calls them out, they never experience any consequences for their actions and ultimately, their words and actions are treated as quirky and endearing. (Green has gamely tried to compare the show to “All in the Family,” but, as EW’s Maerz points out, the show is entirely composed of Archie Bunkers, with no Michael Stivics to serve as a counterweight.)

Smart critics and smarter comedians have talked about how truly good satire is about “punching up” rather than “punching down” — it’s about making the large people in charge uncomfortable, in classic court-jester manner. When the people you’re making uncomfortable are those who are already subject to discrimination and bias on a daily basis, you know you’re making easy jokes and shooting soft targets — you’re engaging in humor that’s designed to thin the herd of its weakest members, not speak truth to power.

Reilly and Earley’s statement continues on by saying that “the series is based heavily on the executive producers’ own lives.” Given that the executive producers are MacFarlane, Wellesley Wild and Alec Sulkin — three white, male New England prep-school grads (MacFarlane attended the Kent School, Wild attended the Westminster School, and Sulkin the Middlesex School, if you’re curious) — it’s not entirely unusual that their “lives” might reflect the worldview exposed in “Dads,” one in which the entire world revolves around the sophomoric antics of childlike white men, where hot Asian women are sexy playthings and Asian males exist solely to be demeaned and unmanned.

“I don’t get it,” said one person who worked on the show. “That ‘tiny China penis’ line comes out of nowhere, and it’s such a tired stereotype. It’s said by an Asian person, so that makes it okay, right? But why would Veronica use that phrasing to describe it? Isn’t she offending herself by proxy? It just comes off as malicious humor. And during the live taping, the joke never elicited more than a handful of chuckles. It was very uncomfortable to watch, and it’s shocking that it’s what they decided to use it to end the episode.”

Of course, as the source points out, it’s not as if there weren’t people who could’ve called the writers out on that joke and many others: “The surprising thing is that there were a good number of Asian Americans in the group of network executives watching the run-throughs, and none of them seemed to balk at the ending. A literal toilet joke was removed at the request of Standards & Practices. So, scatological humor is apparently more offensive than a truly racist Asian stereotype. Confounding!”

It’s frankly hard not to be suspicious, given the number of recent incidents in which Asians have been subjected to tired, racist satire: There was the dumb and nasty joke that an intern at the FAA played after the crash of Asiana flight 214 in San Francisco in July — issuing a press release naming the pilots of the plane as captains “Sum Ting Wong,” “Wi Tu Lo,” “Ho Lee Fuk,” and “Bang Ding Ow,” which Bay Area TV station KTVU (a Fox affiliate) credulously went on to print and read on the air. Then in August, there was the YouTube video made by the band Day Above Ground their song “Asian Girlz,” featuring Vietnamese American model Levy Tran stripping to lyrics like “I love your creamy yellow thighs / Ooh your slanted eyes”; “It’s the Year of the Dragon / Ninja p**** I’m stabbin’.” And then this.

All of these lame and patently offensive attempts at humor at the expense of Asians, triggered a massive outcry from the Asian American community, which — given our digital media savvy and extensive social networks — ended up making each of these incidents go viral.

News of the Asiana prank was all over Twitter and Facebook, and then all over the mainstream news. Day Above Ground, an obscure band with a single EP to its credit, managed to generate over a million views of its video within days of releasing it, before finally pulling it down as the firestorm ran out of control; they also received widespread attention that they would never have gotten otherwise in the blogosphere and even mainstream media. And now comes this — a show whose pilot seems designed to provoke Asian Americans in order to generate as much buzz as possible. Yes, most of it is negative. But there will be a significant number of people who tune in just out of curiosity.

So call me a conspiracy theorist — but is it possible that media creators have begun to make trolling the Asian American community a part of their promotional strategy — with columns like this one accidentally complicit? Maybe there’s a method to this madness after all.

As my source from the production notes, “There’s only one solution: If you don’t like it, don’t watch, download, or buy it. If people don’t tune in, the networks and studios will respond. The creation of a better television world starts there.”

National Film Society interviews…Cookie Monster!:We love the National Film Society (that is to say, hilarious Filipino American filmmakers/vodcasters Patrick Epino and Stephen Dypiangco). We also love Sesame Street. And — given the fact that NFS is part of PBS Digital Studios, it seemed only natural that eventually someone from that side of the Street would wander over to their show. And they have. A big, blue, hilarious get for the Film Societans.